About the exhibit: What does it mean to pass through a city? How long does one stay? What is the residue left behind? Perhaps it is we who compose the residue while our doubles flee the scene leaving us in the lurch. Perhaps we are the residue. The Second City was all about passing through. Here commodities really knew how to dance. They danced to the music of the future. A future that existed as long as it could be bought and sold. By river, rail, road and air nothing was static, nothing remained in place. Anything that did not move was torn down.

What happens when the music stops? Do those passing through get stuck? Do we continue in the perpetual nowtime of a graceful ghost dance or do we stagger like zombies tripping over one another's feet? In the Second City the Louis Sullivan Stock Exchange is in the museum. As a sign of lost élan vital or evidence of an uncanny collective clairvoyance.

Motion and stability are still up for grabs. The Second City conjures trans-millennial debates on cosmology in their current vogue as urban theory. We inadvertently slip back and forth between the rival camps - Ptolemy and Copernicus. "Every photograph is a still life" Garry Winogrand once remarked, with camera to patrol the border between self and other. The supercooled liquid of the glass lens and the camera's electro mechanical guillotine shutter still bear the brunt of negotiating the present collapse into our surroundings.

The artists in this exhibition met in a City Within a City; in a grid of depersonalized confessionals, the networked interior of oversized cubicles that constitute the studios at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Part brothel and part clinic in both form and function. Accumulating and manufacturing symptoms.

The reference is to Roger Caillois's infamous 1935 essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, in which the dissident Surrealist suggested that the phenomenon of insect camouflage should be compared to a type of schizophrenic psychic condition characterized as a "depersonalization by assimilation to space": an entropic loss of distinctions, of ego boundaries, of any bodily sense of inside and outside.